But such deficiencies, apparent as they are in a greater or less degree in every troubadour, ought not to blind us to the high merits of Provençal poetry, its refinement, its tenderness of feeling, its unrivalled perfection of form. Our admiration of these qualities increases when we think of the soil in which this remarkable growth took place. The troubadours were the first harbingers of reviving literary culture after the storms which wrecked the Western Empire. They had no models to fall back upon; for the poets of antiquity were more or less above their ken, and the simple creations of the popular mind beneath their attention. They had even to create their language from a mixture of provincial _patois_. If ever poetry has sprung from the spontaneous impulse of man, it is in this instance. And, what is more, it was at a time when everywhere else intellectual darkness and barrenness covered the land. At the time when Guillem of Poitiers wrote his masterpieces of lyrical refinement, the amalgamation of the native with the foreign idiom had only just begun in England; in Northern France the stage of the primitive epic was hardly reached, and a century was to pass before the seed sown by the troubadours was to bring forth fruit in Germany; Italy yielding to the same influence at a still later period. But the Provençal love-song had reached its autumn before these subsequent developments entered into existence. For a long time it stood alone, an exotic plant of unknown origin, but of rich and peculiar growth, in the wilderness of the early middle ages.